FIFTY-SIX MEN SIGNED THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE
Most Americans can name three of them. This book tells the stories of all fifty-six.
“We mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”
The Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776
On August 2, 1776, fifty-six men signed a document that declared them traitors to the most powerful empire on earth. They pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor. They were not speaking abstractly. Richard Stockton of New Jersey was dragged from his bed at midnight, imprisoned in irons, and tortured until he broke. Thomas Nelson Jr. of Virginia ordered cannon fire on his own house at Yorktown, borrowed two million dollars for the Continental Army, and died at fifty with nothing. Francis Lewis of New York watched his wife be arrested, imprisoned without a bed or proper food, and broken until she died. Thomas Lynch Jr. of South Carolina came to Philadelphia to help his dying father, signed the Declaration in his place, and sailed into the Atlantic Ocean with his wife. Neither of them was ever seen again.
These are not the stories in the textbooks. They are the stories this book was built to tell.
SACRED HONOR: THE LIVES OF THE FIFTY-SIX SIGNERS OF THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE is the complete reference guide to every man who signed the Declaration, all fifty-six, organized by state delegation from New Hampshire to Georgia, in the order their signatures appear on the parchment.
Each profile includes:
- A complete biographical narrative covering the signer’s formation, career, and path to Philadelphia
- His specific wartime service and personal losses
- His post-war life and legacy
- A leadership and faith reflection drawing the man’s story into conversation with character, sacrifice, and civic responsibility
Each of the thirteen colony chapters opens with an introduction to the colony’s founding character, faith tradition, economic life, and road to independence, giving readers the context to understand why each delegation voted the way it did and what it cost them afterward.
The book handles the founding generation honestly. It names the contradiction present in a document about human equality written by men who owned enslaved people. It documents the signers who recanted under torture, the ones who voted against independence before signing it, and the ones who died broke and broken before the war ended. It also documents the faith that sustained the men who held, the Congregationalist covenant theology of New England, the Presbyterian political theology of New Jersey’s John Witherspoon, the Catholic conviction of Charles Carroll of Carrollton, and the explicit Christian confession of Connecticut’s Roger Sherman, who signed all four founding documents and left behind one of the most orthodox Trinitarian statements of any founder.
This is the honest account. The complete account. The one worth knowing on the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.